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08 April 2017

This may seem utterly strange, and particularly so because I was under-loading in the two semesters of my final year at DLSU, but I couldn’t make myself take Business Math until I had absolutely no choice but to do so. All in all, I enrolled in the subject four times, failing the first time and dropping the next two.

I finally enrolled it for the last time during summer school. Partly because I needed to stay in Manila because I was playing Division I club football for San Agustin and needed an excuse to do so; and partly because, at least to my mind, the professors were probably more lenient during the summer because most students would in most likelihood be repeat enrollees.

I was fortunate in that my professor turned out to be this kindly lady who had a real knack for simplifying the complicated. While teachers can be trained, some are just born with the gift of teaching. This teacher was one of those. Perhaps for the first time in my life, I was actually enjoying a Math subject. Who would have thought this was possible?

Because I had so much time, to keep from getting bored at the house where I lived in Manila, I would practice solving problems provided in our textbooks until I had solved them all. The teacher was giving us daily quizzes and I kept perfecting these. Whenever I made mistakes, I was even disappointed with myself. I was getting praised by the teacher regularly. She probably thought that I was a Math geek. I dared not tell her that I was a take-4 Business Math enrollee!

And because of my excellent class standing, I was even exempted from taking the final exam! My final grade? 4.0! Hallelujah! I never imagined I had that in me! I guess the grade merely confirmed what I always knew – that I was not really a dumb-dumb in Math. It was just that I was never really interested in learning the numbers. When I was left with no choice but immerse myself in it, I actually did well!

But then, because I took my final subject during the summer, it was too late for me to join the graduation. Of course, this was exactly as I wanted it. Had I joined graduation, my mother would have discovered that I had only managed to finish Liberal Arts instead of Lia-Com. When I finally returned home to Lipa after summer classes, she wanted to see my transcript of records. I invented one excuse after another until she finally either forgot to ask or just got tired of asking. In fact, I would not see my transcript of records until the late nineties when I asked my former player Lester Padua to get it for me from the DLSU Registrar’s Office.

I needed the transcript because I was about to enroll in a master’s management program. The irony wasn’t lost on me. I dropped business from my Lia-Com program because I couldn’t see its relevance to my life and expected career two decades earlier. In 1999, when I enrolled into De La Salle Lipa’s Master in Management program, it was my decision rather than somebody else’s to study business. I was also better equipped to do so. But I still couldn’t help but smile when it occurred to me that a part of my life that I tried to work around ultimately came back to haunt me until I was left with no choice but to deal with it.

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